CFZ The myth of “halftime adjustments”

[Chuck 54]

Even in high school, adjustments are made on the sideline.
Many times I would ask an OT why a play wasn’t working, why his guy was mucking it up. A common response would be, “he’s not squatting like in the film. He’s sitting wide and shooting the gap. I can’t get there in time.” Okay, tell the guard to slam down the line and ride him out. You dip under his block and work up to the LB. Just change responsibilities.

There are usually more adjustments to make with weaker teams. Strong teams believe in what they’re doing and are consistent. Weaker teams will do things on defense that are not as sound, like crazy stunts and blitzes that are hard to adjust to. This makes you struggle to sustain drives, but you hit on more big plays.

The adjustments are not just made by coaches. Sometimes players will make the adjustments. “Hey this guy is playing me hard inside and I can’t get the slant. The next slant call, I’ll make it look like slant and spin to the outside…throw it early before the safety can get down.” A lot of bad looking passes or even INTs come because the receiver sees one thing, but the QB sees something else, and an anticipated throw looks awful because they didn’t make the same adjustment during the play. Sometimes the receiver was wrong; sometimes the QB was wrong. Sometimes it’s not even about right or wrong.

 

[Vtwin]

On that note. I always find the little mini interviews the sideline reporters do with coaches after the 1st and 3rd quarter to be comical.


1. You can tell the coaches hate it because their focus is elsewhere.

2. None of the coaches say anything other than your typical coach speak lol. “We gotta stop the run”. “We gotta pass protect better” etc. lol

I forget which game it was this weekend but I laughed when the coach spit out the generic, coach speak answer which didn't even really relate to what the sideline reporter said. I was clear the coach saw her lips moving but was paying zero attention to what she was saying.

 

[noshame]

The only thing you can get a handle on at half time is egregious mistakes and penalties.
Mike hasn't figured that out yet

 

[HungryLion]

I forget which game it was this weekend but I laughed when the coach spit out the generic, coach speak answer which didn't even really relate to what the sideline reporter said. I was clear the coach saw her lips moving but was paying zero attention to what she was saying.

Yeah the whole thing is kind of silly. I get the entertainment aspect of the NFL. But coaches need to stay focused on the game and they aren’t offering anything worth watching to us viewers anyway in those interviews.

 

[charron]

That's the beautiful thing these adjustments you see are already built into the game plan and do not need big long speeches or any additional prep. If they do their jobs right before the game it's all on the current play selection charts. All the coaches need to do is start calling those plays. The adjustments that need to happen are mostly mental from the OC usually from being a bit too conservative to calling more plays attacking a defenses weaknesses. The players often get with position coaches and say as an example "hey brown is playing man with no safety help of 1 deep safety so we can attack him on the sideline" and that is what they had aaron rodgers do to beat the cowboys.

 

[RonnieT24]

Landry was an absolute master of film room breakdowns. Most players who played for Landry said he spent hours in the film room with players showing them where their execution worked and where it needed to improve.

Landry was not a rah-rah type coach who gave rousing speeches. His genius was his ability to have his teams completely prepared each week for their opponent with uncanny attention to detail. The Landry-era Cowboys were almost always the best prepared team in the league.

Loved Landry's approach.. except for one thing.. He refused to tap into the emotional aspect of the game. As you said he was not a rah rah coach and he sounded like Mr. Haney of Green Acres so he would have been pretty hard to take seriously if he did ever try to give anything remotely resembling a rah rah speech. As a result at least once a year some inferior team would beat the Cowboys just based on getting themselves hyped to a fever pitch. We know that sort of thing wears thin after a while which is why no other team has ever had a 20 year run with winning records like Landry's Cowboys did.. But I firmly believe that if the Cowboys had a little more emotion in them they likely win at least two more Super Bowls.. There were just those games where teams that had no business beating the Cowboys did so because they were more hyped up.

 

[Runwildboys]

I'm going to take the middle ground on this subject. The idea that adjustments aren't made during halftime seems ridiculous to me, but I'm not sure halftime is anymore important than in game adjustments. The only difference I see coming out of the half is you have a little more control. You know who is getting the ball, you have a chance to reset, even script out the next series of plays like starting the game, etc. Aside from that I agree it's pretty overrated.

Also, you can talk to just about everyone at once, or at least in a couple of groups, to make sure everyone is on the same page.